Here are notes from the US Meetup. I posted my notes and go some others to provide more info, but there still may be some things missing. However, the majority of things we can share are here.

Waze 2013 US Meetup Recap

2012 Summary

Ended with 35 million users and 6 billion miles driven

US drivers are driving approximately 30MPH faster than in 2012. One Wazer in attendance reported the average speed calculated by his car has increased since using Waze.

65,000 editors with 500 million edits

2012 Accomplishments

Daily map updates (applause) which updates approximately 20% of the US map tiles

Tile versioning allows rollbacks when issues are discovered

Auto-scaling of processing power at Amazon when tile updates or routing requests require it. This required significant changes to code allowing dynamic spinning up of new cores and gracefully shutting them down.

In-app geographic advertising as a part of monetization

Looking at 2013

Increasing personalization with features like preferred routes

Integrating with Events (such as facebook events to start with)

Changes in the editor and routing engine (see WME section below)

Community recap from Shirli

Quick review of Waze milestones since 2009

Graphical overview of community activity in the forums, editor

Ohad on WME

Working on features to improve client (Wazer) and editor communication

Want to get more people to enjoy editing maps without sacrificing quality

Connecting less complex issues (problems) with newer editors so they can work on simple things first (how? not shared)

Restrictions/closures will be available in the editor which do not require tile builds to take effect (requires linking the editor with the real-time routing servers)

Editor-editor communication/chat on future roadmap with live view of editors, live chat and offline chat.

Segment-rank-based locks are still coming, but the actual lock level still needs some adjusting and approval by beta editors.

Noam High-level Thoughts (Noam’s Roams)

Working with the US government during Sandy emergency

Finds it interesting there are multiple corporations competitively mapping the world. Is there room for future cooperation?

Future vehicle integration: looks like MirrorLink could be big with up to 20% of US vehicles using it to integrate smartphones with the vehicle.

Waze currently has 105 employees.

"Luckily we still have a lot more to do. It's not going to get boring."

Community Presentations

skbun showed examples of poor routing, where it seems the ratio of the as-the-crow-flies distance to driven-distance is causing Waze routing to fail completely.

bgodette gave examples of the Waze car position jumping north and south off of east-west running roads onto parallel roads even though the system GPS location shows the position never wavering from the main road.

bgodette showed examples of the "first leg bug" where Waze's route overview initial dialog shows a route distance which ignores all segments up to the first turn instruction.

AndyPoms gave a very thorough presentation of functional road classification

Remove US Service Road type: routes the same as street and its use is confusing and redundant. Plan is for Waze to identify these segments, prepare the code to do the mass change and get approval from Champs to proceed. To be removed from WME at the same time.

Rename US "Dirt/4x4" road type to "Unpaved" for clarity.

Create new US "4x4/Offroad" road type as Waze wants all paths of vehicle traffic, no matter how remote or how its used, to be mapped.

Requests Made

Continue to improve consistent and reliable communications. All known issues should be immediately posted to status.waze.com and twitter @waze_status.US will move to self-management, which means that all Area Manager approvals will, at a date to be determined, be decided by US Country Managers and/or Champs. This process and how it is administered exactly needs to be determined as well.

There was a proposal that Area Managers be re-granted full editing rights in their defined area except for user-rank locks. Segment-rank locks would not prevent an AM from updating.

Waze will get back to the Champs by 02 April 2013 on a decision regarding a bug/request tracking tool which can be available to the "public" to add/update/review.

Requested the "Missing Road" Map Problem to either be fixed or be turned off.

Ehud said he wanted to include all driveable surfaces and annotate all parking lots, no matter how small. He said this would allow waze to tell someone where to park (based on the parking history of folks going to the same destination).

AlanOfTheBerg wrote:Here are notes from the US Meetup. I posted my notes and go some others to provide more info, but there still may be some things missing. However, the majority of things we can share are here.

Other Items

The POI database will become part of waze (instead of using bing)

Ehud said he wanted to include all driveable surfaces and annotate all parking lots, no matter how small. He said this would allow waze to tell someone where to park (based on the parking history of folks going to the same destination).

So are we suppose to draw all parking lots as landmarks now? And what did you infer he meant by driveable surfaces? Does that include all parking lot roads or still just the major roads in and out as per usual.

HavanaDay wrote:So are we suppose to draw all parking lots as landmarks now? And what did you infer he meant by driveable surfaces? Does that include all parking lot roads or still just the major roads in and out as per usual.

There was discussion about POI vs. landmark where POI is a point, not a shaded area like we have now. I am not clear whether Waze is say we should be mapping all business, etc. as landmarks or whether a different feature for POI will be coming. Someone who was paying more attention than me will need to chime in.

Every drivable surface does mean parking lots, but there was a lot of discussion around that topic and how Waze wants parking lots done. On one hand they seemed to say map the lots as roads, then they said just entrance/exit stubs and landmarks otherwise. Pretty unclear IMO. The "all drivable surfaces" comment came out of the question, "Does Waze want us to map all the forest roads, the 4-ft wide off-road, no cell-service roads used by quads and hunters, etc?" And Ehud basically said, "yes." This is why we are rearranging the road types a bit.

Glad to here we're still slowing getting to time based turn restrictions.

AlanOfTheBerg wrote:[*]Reversible roadways also on the roadmap after time-based turn restrictions.

This makes no sense to me. Reversible roadways could be handled with just segment time based speed data and thus could be done before time based turn restrictions. However, we can map reversible roadways with time based turn restrictions. Once we have time based turn restrictions why won't we just use the turn restrictions to map the reversible roadways? What would be left to do to implement reversible roadways?

One issue I don't see on the list. Was there any discussion of where waze is heading with the information sought here. In particular any discussion of HOV lanes?

Reversible roadways also on the roadmap after time-based turn restrictions.

This makes no sense to me. Reversible roadways could be handled with just segment time based speed data and thus could be done before time based turn restrictions. However, we can map reversible roadways with time based turn restrictions. Once we have time based turn restrictions why won't we just use the turn restrictions to map the reversible roadways? What would be left to do to implement reversible roadways?

Restricting turns onto a two-way segment effectively makes it one-way for through-routing. But you would also have to restrict turns off of the segment, in case someone begins navigating in the middle of the segment. It can be done, but it would mean coordinating maybe a half-dozen independent timed turn restrictions.

You could likewise do away with all one-way roads by managing turn restrictions in this way--but the concept of directionality is a lot simpler.

CBenson wrote:Reversible roadways could be handled with just segment time based speed data and thus could be done before time based turn restrictions. However, we can map reversible roadways with time based turn restrictions.

I don't disagree. However, do make it more accessible to more editors, the interface needs to be around "road direction" and not about "restricted turns." They very well may have these set up similarly, with time-based turn restrictions, though. Not sure how this will be rendered in the app as right now, tile builds are required for road directionality visibility, but these time-based features will be set up in WME but operate on functions within the routing server.

AlanOfTheBerg wrote:Every drivable surface does mean parking lots, but there was a lot of discussion around that topic and how Waze wants parking lots done. On one hand they seemed to say map the lots as roads, then they said just entrance/exit stubs and landmarks otherwise. Pretty unclear IMO.

I agree I think we could use some clarification on this. Until I understand better I guess it is business as usual leave parking to the newer editors or add the bare minimum to keep frequent requests at bay.

olestas wrote:Will you do the same for INTL server?Will you also change the way waze navigates through these types of roads?Will you add option to avoid 4x4/Offroad type and/or Unpaved type separately?

We only discussed this for the US. World Champs can decide the same or not. The "avoid dirt roads" will be changed to "avoid unpaved roads" in the app. I believe that "avoid 4x4/offroad" should also be added, but changes to the routing server need to be made for that. Longer-term.